Over the past month, U.S. President Donald Trump has shifted from misogynistic jabs to full‑scale performances of militarized authority, an evolution entirely consistent his political...
After years of calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, a ceasefire was recently announced and…those calling for the ceasefire are upset about it. There are some valid reasons to hold off on celebrating, but...
Back in March, I wrote a post at Lawyers, Guns and Money called “Remember ‘Great Power Competition?’ Lol.” As the “Grand Strategy” of Trump 2.0 comes into focus, I thought it...
Dominant theories of international political economy leave little room for the influence of individuals. They also never anticipated that the United States might seek to completely upend the global economic order.
I was born a proud Protestant. A Lutheran in a town still marked by Catholic-Protestant tensions, with Catholic friends who told me I don't worship right, neighbors who claimed Catholics were polytheists, and a grandmother who wore orange on St. Patrick's Day (I never quite got that, as we had no connection to Ireland). But I also felt drawn to the Roman Catholic church. As I read more theology and myth in college, I appreciated the mysteries in Rome's ancient traditions. Graduate school at the Jesuit Georgetown University made me appreciate how Catholics applied their faith to the world. I...
I published an article yesterday in Real Clear Defense. The title is “The Road to Securing European Cooperation on China Runs Through Ukraine”, but I suppose I could have called this piece, “How to Screw Up on Multiple Fronts at the Same Time.” That might have been harder to get past an editor. I spent a fair amount of time this past fall talking to people working in the EU institutions about China. The short version is that they are concerned about the PRC’s actions to the point that most of the people you talk to candidly at the European External Action Service (EEAS) or elsewhere in...
The buzzword of the first Trump administration was “Great Power Competition.” That was also a lie.
A lot of ink has been spilled and bytes spent on the reflections over Trump's failed assassination this past weekend. I won't pretend I know better, although as a regular academic that's kind of my job and an occupational hazard. But as soon as my co-author texted me about the events in Butler, PA, I responded that a carnival usually ends with the execution of the mock-king. Once more details started to come in, especially about the identity of the shooter, it made even more "sense" (if any sense can be found in an act of violence). Let me explain. 6 years ago, I posted on the Duck...
When I was but a lad, it was still quite common for foreign-policy hawks to invoke “Munich” as an all-purpose rebuttal to compromise with (they would say the “appeasement of”) rival states, most notably the Soviet Union. The failure of the 1938 agreement — which handed Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in an effort to avoid a general European war. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously proclaimed that the agreement would produce “peace in our time.” The effort, of course, failed. A few months later, a weakened...
If Donald Trump was President of the United States when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, instead of Joe Biden, Trump’s personality would have led to a very different U.S. response. Trump would not have swiftly and strongly condemned Russia or clearly sided with Ukraine in the initial stages of the invasion, and he would not have brought together a multilateral front against Russia – as Biden did.
Recent chatter about David Remnick's interview of Stephen Kotkin reminds me of another interview that Kotkin recorded in February. Kotkin draws an analogy between Putin's decision to invade Ukraine and Stalin's decision to give Kim Il-sung the "green light" to invade South Korea in 1950. The comparison not only highlights the dysfunctions of personalist regimes, but the (potential) effects of the Russo-Ukraine War on U.S. foreign policy. Back in January, Gregory Mitrovich published an excellent piece about that in The Washington Post. Though the Cold War had begun several years before the...
Not many know that Trump was on the verge of publicly announcing U.S. withdrawal from the alliance at the 2018 summit. Congress would have prevented a formal end to U.S. membership, but Trump’s announcement itself would have caused irreparable damage. Why then did Trump change his position on NATO in 2019? And why was NATO, at least in military terms, in better state when Trump left office than when he began his term?